Jimi Green – 3D art and animation student @ Design Centre Enmore

Animation – Assessment 1- Process Diary – Week 4 – Part 1

Ball bounce recap
This week we recap the ball bounce exercise in a a little bit more detail. This was handy for me as I understood it the first time but wanted more practice really getting used to seeing what the shape of the tangents should be for the optimum result.
The lecturer re-enforced the point that a good animator mostly doesn’t even need the view-port active to be able to see the animation. They can see and feel the movement just from looking at the tangents in the graph editor.
We also used the ‘advanced ball rig’ this time which worked a little better. So, the process was –

• key the ball translates every 10 frames using ‘ball_Ctrl_Translate’. Again, we delete the excess keys on the z translates to smooth it to one curve. Then we broke and freed the tangents on the Y translate keys to create sharp cusps. This is how the curves for this ended up -you can easily see that each new bounce has less energy than the last.

• Key the squash and stretch using the ‘squash_Ctrl_Top’. There are two parts to this-
1/ Squash Amount – Key the squash value at each contact point, then key zero on the frames either side of that frame i.e key -.8 at frame 10, then 0 at frame 9 and 0 at frame 11. Then also key to zero at the extreme up point, i.e frame 20, 40, 60. 2/ Squash Angle – we key the z translates to control the angle of the squash. Since the ball is moving in Z, we want the squash to happen directionally with the momentum of the energy.
Here is the curve for those values after tweaking.
• Ball rotate – key the ball to rotate in X using the ‘ball_Ctrl_Rotate’ controller- pretty simple just a 360 total rotation keyed at the start and end with a slow in, slow out.
• then the only other step is to adjust the timing using the dope sheet. Just like last time, select some frames and translate them back in time. Then I like to remove the left-most frames from the selection and drag again, then repeat.
The idea is for the bounces to happen faster and faster until the end as the energy dissipates and the bounces get smaller.